Many Christians, who have been the most vulnerable religious minority targeted by Islamic militants in Iraq since 2003, say that they have found a safe and well-protected haven here in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq.

As recent as last week, one of the main Christian churches in Iraq was targeted when some Islamic Arab extremists broke into the church and held dozens of prayers hostage and killed more than 50 of them.

A day after that bloody incident, the Christians as well as Muslim Kurds here in Erbil took to the streets condemning the consecutive attacks on a peaceful tiny religious minority in the Arab-dominated part of Iraq.

But the story of Christians is different here in the northern Kurdish region of Iraq.

One Christian leader, Fahmi Mati Solaqa, who is the mayor of Ankawa, a neighborhood where the Christians have a de-facto autonomous rule in Erbil, says Christians enjoy a “unique life in Kurdistan,” that they do not in the rest of the Middle East.

“There is a plan to downsize Christians in the Middle East,” said Solaqa. “In Lebanon, the Christians have been reduced from %60 to %40. This rate is even more in Iraq.”

“But in Kurdistan, by contrast to the entire Middle East, the Christians have increased,” added Solaqa.

Paying Brazil with taxpayer money to drill for oil off its coast while preventing us from drilling off our own didn’t make any sense until we realized that George Soros is heavily invested in Brazil’s Petrobras. Likewise the TSA’s outrageous and unconstitutional screening procedures are starting to make sense. The new porno scanners are made by a company called Rapiscan (probably pronounced “rape-ee-scan”), and George Soros, the billionaire funder of the country’s liberal political infrastructure, owns 11,300 shares of OSI Systems Inc., the company that owns Rapiscan. Not surprisingly, OSI’s stock has appreciated considerably over the course of the year. Soros certainly is a savvy investor.

I once found myself in a conversation with a much older lady at 4 AM one morning in a snowstorm. Her name was Bonnie. Delays caused us to sit together in a warm car. She was originally from northern Louisiana and was raised in a town that had a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II.

Bonnie worked in the camp’s cafeteria for a year or so. She told me how fearful she was when she first started working there. Everyone in town had heard stories of how vicious the prisoners were.

But to her surprise she found the prisoners to be young, homesick boys much like the boys she grew up with. Over time the overheated stories faded and most of the town came to accept their “visitors” out there in the camp.

As the war came to its end many of the prisoners expressed a desire to stay in America. And it came to pass that many did. Some even settled right there in her town because of the good treatment they had received from the locals. Some returned to Germany but found their way back over the next few years. Some brought their wives and children. Others came back and married American women.

Bonnie married one of those who returned. They had two children before he died in the late 60’s in a car accident. Isn’t life strange?

How left-wing propagandists, a fellow-traveling Nobel committee and a corrupt media perpetrated a monstrous hoax.

The story of Rigoberta Menchú, a Quiché Mayan from Guatemala whose autobiography catapulted her to international fame, won her the Nobel Peace Prize and made her an international emblem of the dispossessed indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere and their attempt to rebel against the oppression of European conquerors, has now been exposed as a political fabrication, a tissue of lies. It is one of the greatest hoaxes of the 20th century.

President Obama’s friend and advisor, Valerie Jarrett, has been quoted as saying…

“I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. … He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. … So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. … He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”

Members of a Kansas church that protests at military funerals may have found themselves in the wrong town Saturday.

Shortly after finishing their protest at the funeral of Army Sgt. Jason James McCluskey of McAlester, a half-dozen protesters from Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., headed to their minivan, only to discover that its front and rear passenger-side tires had been slashed.

To make matters worse, as their minivan slowly hobbled away on two flat tires, with a McAlester police car following behind, the protesters were unable to find anyone in town who would repair their vehicle, according to police.

Sarah Palin’s reality show scored huge ratings for its premiere Sunday night, while the guardians of usage at the New Oxford American Dictionary awarded the former Alaska governor the higher-brow distinction of coining 2010’s “word of the year” — “refudiate” — via her Twitter account.